RE: Testing JDK bugs?

[Sven de Marothy <sven@physto.se>]

On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 09:56 +0200, Jeroen Frijters wrote:

> Even if something is "Obviously Wrong", it may not be a good idea to fix
> it because it would be a breaking change. For example:
> http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6227069
> 

Obvious? Anyway, IMHO "fixing" something in a compatibility-breaking
way simply isn't a fix at all. It's the opposite. 

However, this goes in the opposite direction as well. And that's when
you really need to make a judgement call. I just did so in the
BigDecimal patch I just commited (which is why I was rude enough to
cross-post it to the main list).

Which is that setScale(scale, rounding) should throw an
ArithmeticException if scale < 0. The spec says so, and the JRE
does so prior to v1.5. In 1.5 it does not (with no change to the doc).

So without thinking too hard I figured it was a 1.5 regression and 
put the exception back in (fixing a mauve regression on our part).
After all, this could break compatibility, in theory.

Although now I'm not quite so sure, because the probable cause
of this is that the divide(BigDecimal, scale, rounding) method
which we (and Sun, presumably) implement this on, shows the same
behaviour, only the docs have changed. 

/Sven